Project management relates to management of collaborative work among a project manager and team members during a project. Good collaboration is one of key factors to result in success of a project. Collaboration always emerges from unstructured, ad-hoc communications, including brainstorming, net-meeting, email exchanges, document modifications, etc. And the contents in the collaborative processes have been widely spread in varieties of applications and corresponding files thereof. The contents in the collaborative processes are important to cooperators and ought to be shared as knowledge.
With the fast development of globalization and information technology, a new work style that people in a project is cross-region, cross-organization and cross-function has emerged. The project productivity is more than the sum of work performance of individual members, and instead, the performance of any one member influences the performance results of all other members. Thus, project management requires tight coordination between the project members and requires the project manager to well know the whole progress and conduct effective examination.
Collaborative communication allows people to exchange tacit knowledge and helps to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Thus, interactions and communications of “ad-hoc” type in the task execution process frequently occur between varieties of project members. Generally speaking, related data in a project is widespread in different applications and stored as individual files. Although this communication approach is comparatively flexible, a user is required to manually associate the various information with the project if there is a need to analyze task interdependence, track the project process and store as knowledge for later use. However, it will become difficult to manage and examine the data if a project lasts for a too long period of time or there are too many project members.
With the rapid improvement of computer capability, a large number of project management software has emerged. Conventional project management software is mainly characterized in that they aim to improve project managers' ability to plan tasks, identify and mitigate risks, and redesign project processes by Gantt charts, PERT diagrams, resource histograms, and project status tracking. As to conventional project management software, the key issue concerned is to schedule, and more attention is paid to project inputs and outputs, while task interdependence analysis, process management, document management, asset management, reuse, etc are often ignored.
For example, Microsoft Project 2000 is very popular in project management at present, but it does not provide centralized management of multiple related activities in executing a task. Users can only know work results via the software but have no knowledge of the activities during the work. This leads to inefficient information sharing between project members and hard examination and estimation on the project by the project manager.
Groove Virtual Office (a software product by Microsoft Corporation) provides a solution for managing a distributed project team, which realizes management by getting every member on the same platform, meeting virtually with team members. It focuses on the shared working environment for communication but does not specify communication of this kind with the project tasks as the object. Thus, team members cannot have a clear understanding of the relationship between project tasks and virtual communication, and the process cannot be effectively tracked.
Activity Explorer, a research prototype from IBM, supports management of activities organized by different thematic contents through shared objects and dynamic membership. It only acts as a platform for sharing and managing various activities which are not for a target of project tasks or objectives.
To sum up, there is a need to provide a solution for managing activities in order to overcome problems in project management of the prior art.